Welcome Hypothes.is Project, an Open Access Platform for Collaborative Annotation

December 01, 2015

Hypothes.is Project is a new open access web platform that enables collaborative annotation across websites. Launching today with a coalition of over 40 scholarly publishers (including University of California Press), along with platforms and technology partners that share the goal of building an open conversation layer over all knowledge, the Hypothes.is Project will allow this coalition to work together to in partnership in order to “define, design and implement a common framework for scholarly collaboration from peer-review through post-publication discussion, all based on open standards…The coalition is open to any publisher, platform, library or technology organization that shares its vision and objectives and wants to participate”.

University of California Press is thrilled to be working with many university press colleagues over the coming years in order to establish Hypothes.is Project’s dynamic, user-friendly collaborative annotation platform. Through the utilization of its interoperable conversation layer that’s set to transform scholarly collaboration, annotation will be facilitated with ease, and can be implemented for all the following functionalities: personal note taking, peer review, copy editing, post publication discussion, journal clubs, classroom uses, automated classification, deep linking, and more to come in the future.

Hypothes.is Project states that “in the last few years a small community has been working to…standardize a model for an “annotation”, the unit of conversation that this paradigm enables, and to build it into the very fabric of the Web. Their efforts led in the fall of 2014, to a formal Working Group within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the standards body for the Web. Much progress has been made, and many implementations are mature enough now to begin deployment.”

Please check out the introductory video Hypothes.is Project created in order to learn more about how this innovative technological platform will push forward the democratization of information on the web.